Armorica

Coordinates: 48°10′00″N 1°00′00″W / 48.1667°N 1.0000°W / 48.1667; -1.0000
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the historic region. For other uses, see Armorica (disambiguation).
The Roman geographical area of Armorica. The Seine and the Loire are marked in red.

In ancient times, Armorica or Aremorica (

Brittany Peninsula, extending inland to an indeterminate point and down the Atlantic Coast.[1]

Name

The name Armorica is a Latinized form of the

Late Antiquity, the Tractus Armoricani ('Armorican Tract').[3][4]

In medieval

Old Breton Letau, or in the Latinized form Letavia.[5]

In Breton, which belongs to the Brythonic branch of the Insular Celtic languages, along with Welsh and Cornish, "on [the] sea" is war vor (Welsh ar fôr, "f" being voiced and pronounced like English "v"), but the older form arvor is used to refer to the coastal regions of Brittany, in contrast to argoad (ar "on/at", coad "forest" [Welsh ar goed or coed "trees"]) for the inland regions.[6] The cognate modern usages suggest that the Romans first contacted coastal people in the inland region and assumed that the regional name Aremorica referred to the whole area, both coastal and inland.

History

Map of Briton settlements in the 6th-century, including what became Brittany and Britonia (in Spain).

Turones, and the Atseui
.

Trade between Armorica and Britain, described by

Solent
. This 'prehistoric' connection of Cornwall and Brittany set the stage for the link that continued into the medieval era. Still farther East, however, the typical Continental connections of the Britannic coast were with the lower Seine valley instead.

A Celtic stater made from billon alloy found in Armorica
Coriosolites
  Redones
  Namnetes

Archaeology has not yet been as enlightening in Iron-Age Armorica as the coinage, which has been surveyed by Philip de Jersey.[9]

Under the

Attila the Hun. Jordanes
lists Aëtius' allies as including Armoricans and other Celtic or German tribes (Getica 36.191).

The "Armorican" peninsula came to be settled with

Pol Aurelian
, among the "founder saints" of Brittany.

The linguistic origins of

British language, like Welsh and Cornish one of the Insular Celtic languages, brought by these migrating Britons. Still, questions of the relations between the Celtic cultures of Britain— Cornish and Welsh—and Celtic Breton are far from settled. Martin Henig (2003) suggests that in Armorica as in sub-Roman Britain
:

There was a fair amount of creation of identity in the

migration period. We know that the mixed, but largely British and Frankish population of Kent repackaged themselves as 'Jutes', and the largely British populations in the lands east of Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall) seem to have ended up as 'West Saxons'. In western Armorica, the small élite which managed to impose an identity on the population happened to be British rather than 'Gallo-Roman' in origin, so they became Bretons. The process may have been essentially the same."[13]

According to C.E.V. Nixon, the collapse of Roman power and the depredations of the Visigoths led Armorica to act "like a magnet to peasants, coloni, slaves and the hard-pressed" who deserted other Roman territories, further weakening them.[14]

Breton March under a Frankish margrave
.

In popular culture

The home village of the fictional comic-book hero

April Fool's Day in 1993.[15] The opening chapter of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce also refers to North Armorica.[16]

Footnotes

  1. ^ Merriam-Webster Dictionary, s.v. "Aremorica"; The Free Dictionary, s.v. "Aremorica" Archived 2011-06-07 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ^ Delamarre 2003, p. 53.
  3. ISSN 0083-5897
    .
  4. doi:10.3406/bsnaf.2001.10167
    .
  5. ^ Delamarre 2003, pp. 204–205.
  6. ^ The Irish form is ar mhuir, the Manx is er vooir and the Scottish form air mhuir. However, in those languages, the phrase means "on the sea", as opposed to ar thír or ar thalamh/ar thalúin (er heer/er haloo, air thìr/air thalamh) "on the land".
  7. ^ History Compass : Home Archived April 19, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  8. De Bello Gallico
    ii.4.
  9. ^ "Coinage in Iron Age Armorica", Studies in Celtic Coinage, 2 (1994)
  10. ^ Leon Fleuriot's primarily linguistic researches in Les Origines de la Bretagne, emphasizes instead the broader influx of Britons into Roman Gaul that preceded the fifth-century collapse of Roman power.
  11. ^ Procopius, in History of the Wars, viii, 20, 6-14.
  12. ^ K. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain Edinburgh, 1953:14f.
  13. ^ Martin Henig, British Archaeology, 2003, review of The British Settlement of Brittany by Pierre-Roland Giot, Philippe Guigon & Bernard Merdrignac
  14. ^ C.E.V. Nixon, "Relations Between Visigoths and Romans in Fifth Century Gaul", in John Drinkwater, Hugh Elton (eds) Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity?, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 69
  15. ^ Keys, David (1 April 1993). "Asterix's home village is uncovered in France: Archaeological dig reveals fortified Iron Age settlement on 10-acre site". The Independent. Retrieved 17 April 2015.
  16. ^ Rearrived from North Armorica
Bibliography

See also

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Armorica".

48°10′00″N 1°00′00″W / 48.1667°N 1.0000°W / 48.1667; -1.0000

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